27 hours of travelling and I arrived back at Heathrow airport at 5 am on Monday morning. The journey had involved 3 flights, two with Qantas and one with BA. The Australian airline wins hands down on customer service… I was fortunate enough to fly Business class and Qantas made me feel welcome, used my name when talking to me (whereas BA just called me ‘Madam’…).
I left a sunlit Adelaide and changed planes at Sydney Airport. Note to schedule planners – it is a LONG way to the transfer gate of the internal terminal, the connecting bus to the international terminal doesn’t run that often, and my onward flight to Hong Kong departed from the furthest gate! I arrived on board puffing and panting and with just enough time to find my seat and down a glass of champagne before we took off….
Hong Kong Airport is massive and rather impersonal. It is also somewhat disconcerting to see people walking round in surgical masks. I felt as if I was ‘unclean’ and they feared I carried some rogue virus!
The next 13 hours were exhausting, even though I slept through 6 of them. Outside was total darkness, and the cabin crew were hard to find. All in all not a great experience.
And so back to London and my pre-booked taxi – which failed to turn up! Two hours and several phone calls later I ceased to be a customer of the Leicester based taxi company (who advertise on line as a specialist airport transfer service ‘you can trust’!!) and hired a car to drive myself back to Leicestershire.
The end of my wonderful Australian adventure – but just the beginning of 2013 and all the adventures I have still to experience. Watch this space…. Meanwhile I can look at pictures like this to remind me that there is an exciting world out there where the path can lead who knows where…
ALIVE AND CREAKING 
